Compulsively Crafty

​This is a "dirty pour" on a canvas board. The board got pretty warped, possibly because this is a wet process...it takes several days for these to dry sometimes.

So there's this thing I stumbled across on Pinterest. I feel like it's kind of a new "thing," but considering the volume of tutorial matter on yonder interwebs, I suspect it's been around for at least a few minutes. It's called Acrylic Pour Painting, and it's so freaking addicting--and messy--it'll be a miracle if I get my copy edits done by next week.

Basically, you take a bunch of acrylic paint--the cheaper little bottles, or big squishy tubes, some artists even use house paint! You mix your paint with a "medium" that makes it a little more liquid without watering it down (I use Floetrol, but you can use Elmer's Glue-All if you want!), though you do add a little water sometimes. You can add a few drops of silicone oil if you like (this makes the round spots called "cells" appear). THEN, you start pouring.

You can pour stuff strait on your canvas (or block of wood, or ceramic tile, or whatever) and mess with it that way.You can do a "dirty pour" (heh. heh) and pour all of your colors into a cup, just kind of layer them in there, and dump all that on your canvas (that's what the one above is). You can drag string across your painting, you can use a hairdryer to move the paint around, use a balloon to squish it up (see below). ​

I used a balloon to smoosh puddles of paint around.

some tiles I'm going to convince Mr. Stanley to install in our new house. Maybe.

There are tons of how-to videos and blog posts out there, and I could spend hours, and hours (okay, I HAVE spent hours and hours) watching them, especially when I can't sleep. There are too many amazing artists and websites out there to list them all, but a couple of my go-to sites are ACRYLIC POURING and RICK CHEADLE. Rick Cheadle even shows how you can get started and do a pour using $5 worth of stuff from the Dollar Store. Wouldn't it be fun to have paint pouring parties? Maybe when it's warm and we can go outside?Come on. Give it a go. You know you want to!

I'm calling this one "Watch a hundred hours of how-to videos, then ignore most of what you saw and dump a bunch of shit in a cup and dump it on your canvas." Surprisingly, some of the people in the Facebook group I joined have paintings with the exact same name!